Fortinet increases 5G security capabilities

Cybersecurity solutions provider Fortinet has announced capabilities for securing the path to 5G with its solutions for mobile core networks and cloud infrastructures, including its virtual SPU technology and security and systems.

With the promise for faster connection speeds, massive connectivity scale, and new revenue opportunities, 5G will have a profound impact on mobility and digital transformation.

Fortinet products and solutions executive vice president John Maddison says, "With 5G, mobile infrastructure's end-to-end innovation will continue to transform into a platform and catalyst for value creation and service innovation.

“Throughout this transformation, Fortinet's architecture and solutions aim to provide security for multiple LTE, LTE-A, and 5G use cases to help secure mobile infrastructures, from radio access network (RAN) to the telco cloud, and offers customers carrier-grade performance and capacity with cloud-grade scalability, visibility, and control."

5G brings both opportunity and risk

The advent of 5G will extend a digital connection to almost every facet of digital lives.

In many of the somewhat futuristic-sounding new use cases, such as autonomous vehicles, AR/VR immersive experiences, smart cities, ultralow latency, bandwidth, and speed, delivery has been the missing puzzle piece.

For years now, the mobile interconnection of all these things seemed inevitable, yet the density of connections, all with adequate speed, latency and related services, had so far remained unachievable in all but limited proof-of-concept testing.

With 5G and the impending orders-of-magnitude advances in bandwidth, connection and use case possibilities, there is an opportunity for end-to-end innovation as the mobile infrastructure is transformed into a platform and a catalyst for value creation and service innovation.

More than ever, mobile network providers will become secure business enablers.

For example, service providers will have new revenue-generating opportunities in IoT, such as manufacturing automation, industrial telemetry, emergency response systems, robotic surgery, 4K UHD video streaming, and more.

However, these innovations will also bring a corresponding increase in the potential havoc wrought by denial of service, advanced threats and other forms of cyberattack on the core network infrastructure itself.

Security is an imperative to protect and operate evolving 4G and new 5G mobile networks. These new service use cases need capabilities beyond a stateful firewall, with capacity and reliability to meet service level agreement (SLA) goals for uptime and quality of experience.

It offers the ability to build a security framework that helps optimise cost of launching and operating new services and revenue opportunities, mitigate advanced threats, and achieve service level goals.

Service providers can realise this by utilising Fortinet advanced security and high-performance systems that also give mobile carriers improved visibility through comprehensive and correlated analytics, the ability to thwart complex external and internal security threats impacting network infrastructure and services.